Join us at Mountain Sky Ranch for a day of friends, festivity, education, and food to celebrate restoration agriculture and ecolonomic living!

Saturday and Sunday - Apr, 22-23, 2017

Mountain Sky Ranch

300 SPOTS

About The Event

Come celebrate ecolonomic sustainability and restoration agriculture with us! Join us at Mountain Sky Ranch in Berthoud for a day or weekend of FREE and paid education and festivity!

Throughout the weekend we will have speakers and presentations on various topics of sustainability, guided tours and hikes, a kids corral with fun activities and supervision, as well as music, food and drink. Free raffle prizes throughout the day.

We will host Mark Shepard and Restoration Agriculture Development for a weekend Workshop (Friday - Sunday) on arid western land agriculture and ecology! This is the best live event you can attend to learn about land management that will save us from food crisis in the near future!

We will end the weekend with a special Ecological Aquaculture Workshop on Sunday (23th) for those who purchase tickets, and for Students in our Ecological Aquaculture Course. Proceeds go to supporting young budding ecopreneurs and sustainable agriculturalists.

Also, we will have our Second Ecolonomics Fishing Tournament throughout the day on Saturday (22th) at our Mountain Sky Ranch ponds. This very cool event is for fishermen/women of all skill levels. There will be very cool prizes for the winners and fun for all!

Finally, this Earth Day Weekend IDEA is being held at one of the premier alpaca ranches in North America, and we are going to be showcasing our elite herd of alpacas, as well as our farm store, and possibly even the chance to be seeing a new baby being born!

Come and visit with us! This will be Fun!

SUPPORT LOCAL! RESERVE YOUR SPOT NOW!

You can Fish for Fun and Profit on Saturday and Learn How to Raise Fish on Sunday! orYou can spend the whole weekend with Mark Shepard as he teaches about how you can restore any piece of land into a place of beauty and wonder for now and forever!

Worldwide Aquaculture

Ecological Aquaculture Workshop

Have you ever thought about turning a pond or a stream into a food source for your family or even possibly an income generating resource for you? You should! We did and we now have a pond system that generates signifcant income annually, with no external inputs, and is an ecologically balanced system!

Dr. Wayne Dorband will Lead a One Day Workshop on How You Might Apply Ecological Aquaculture to a Pond or Stream that you own or manage. You could develop both a profit center and an attractive recreational resource for your property. You will get to see first hand how we have done this at Mountain Sky Ranch. Come and get a unique hands on and "feet wet" experience!

To our knowledge there has not been a Workshop like this ever offered by anyone other than us (we had our first last fall). This is going to be pretty special. Normally we would charge about $200 for this one day interactive event, but we are significantly discounting this event to $150 because we are holding it in conjunction with our IDEA Earth Day Weekend 2017 Event. It will last all day (9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, and lunch will be included). This is a crazy cheap price and you should take advantage of it today! We only have a very limited number of spaces for this Workshop, so register as soon as possible (you can register below) before it fills up.

Mountain Sky Ranch

Second Ecolonomics Fishing Tournament

OK, this is going to be fun. We have an amazing fish community in our ponds at Mountain Sky Ranch. Two different times in the last year we have caught separate bass that are over 6 lb. in size. At the tournament in the fall we caught over 350 fish that we measured and marked to we can assess the community size of the pond (Ecological Aquaculture). There are also an abundance of hard-fighting and healthy smaller bass, yellow perch, channel catfish, and maybe even a rogue trout or two in our 11 ponds at the Ranch.

So we decided to host our second Ecolonomics Fishing Tournament. When you register below, you will be able to select a 2 hour time slot on Saturday (22th) for you to fish and try to catch the five largest fish that you can during that period. You do not to be "super-fishermen/women" and you do not even have to have any fishing gear (we can provide it for you), but you can certainly bring all your own if you choose. We are charging a nominal cost of $20 for your entry, and we will even have some surprise goodies for you. There will be prices for winners. You can register below, first come first served to pick a time slot for your tournament experience. This is going to be Fun!

Sara's Pick of the Coop

Will share eggs from ranch roaming hens who live out their lives foraging on wooded hillsides of the ranch. Respect for life is of utmost importance at Sara's Pick of the Coop and the hens are able to roam freely in daylight hours, are able to fulfill natural behaviors, are provided with enrichment on a regular basis, and have full access to a balanced diet at all times, although, most choose to forage for insects and vegetation on the hillside.

Mountain Sky Alpacas

Generously provides unique and delicious alpaca meat for you throughout the day. Mountain Sky Alpacas is one of the most elite alpaca breeders in North America with incredible genetics from across the world. We currently have almost 50 babies from last year on the farm you can visit and maybe even hug. It is very likely we will have one or more new-borns that will also be there for your enjoyment.

We have many very special alpacas on the farm you can meet up close and personal. They include:

- Snowmass Matrix - The Most Prolific, consistent genetic producing, expensive (he sold for $675,000 at auction in 2010) alpaca in the world.- Snowmass Matrix Belvedere - Maybe the best Matrix son. Belvie is a National and World Champion with baby-fine lingering fleece at seven years of age. Oh yes, he is producing as consistently as dad.- Andean Midnight - The highest price selling Maiden alpaca in auction history and the mother of a number of amazing offspring.- Snowmass Golden Myst - The highest selling Female alpaca at the same sale that Matrix sold at in 2010. More importantly the mom of Snowmass Ferrari, possibly the best black male ever (a Matrix son)

We will give you a detailed tour of our alpaca operations if you desire or you can see the herd from the comfort of a Hay Ride! Come join us!

Restoration Agriculture Workshop Mark Shepard - Saturday and Sunday

This is very special! Mark only comes to Colorado for a Workshop once every several years. Don't miss this.

What will you do, and what can you learn? Mark will alternate between teaching in a lecture format in the mornings and walking and teaching across Mountain Sky Ranch in the afternoons. You cannot even imagine how much you will learn.

You will feel like you have been fed through a "firehose" as they say! We will probably do some earthworks, survey the land and maybe do some plantings. Water management, keyline applications, swales and berms, crop and plant selection, economics for your location, collaborative farming, and much, much more...